The Minor Aesthetics of Falling

This chapter attends to two documentary theatre performances, Fly ( fei 飞 ) and Return ( gui 归 ) (2013), collectively created by rural youth in southern China in collaboration with U.S. and local-based artists to document how they negotiate the changing conditions of childhood, migration, and climate change toward collective liberation. Drawing from Asian/American studies and performance studies, this chapter pushes toward minor aesthetics as a way of reading and making “applied theatre” by leaning into affects, gestures, ephemera, and fissures to refuse majoritarian frames that undergird narratives of liberal freedom. By framing (im)mobility as an aesthetic, this chapter argues that the minor aesthetics of falling not only make visible normative aspirations and sufferings of the “good life” but also suspend the major conditions of upward mobility and invite us to reckon with “left-behind” feelings. By dwelling in the act of falling and its afterlife, Fly and Return call for a recognition of interconnectedness across rural lives and migratory birds in contemporary China.